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Language and Literature Studies

Theoretical Linguistics

Comparative Linguistics

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This paper deals with the three types of modality – epistemic, deontic and dynamic. It examines the relation between the synchronic uses of the modal auxiliary must and the semi-modals have to and have got to as well as their Lithuanian translation correspondences (TCs) found in a bidirectional translation corpus. The study exploits quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The purpose is to find out which type of modality is most common in the use of must, have to and have got to; to establish their equivalents in Lithuanian in terms of congruent or non-congruent correspondence (Johansson 2007); and to determine how Lithuanian TCs (verbs or adverbials) correlate with different types of modality expressed. The analysis has shown that must is mostly used to convey epistemic nuances, while have to and have got to feature in non-epistemic environments. The findings show that must can boast of a great diversity of TCs. Some of them may serve as epistemic markers; others appear in deontic domains only. Have (got) to, on the other hand, is usually rendered by the modal verbs reikėti ‘need’ and turėti ‘must/have to’, which usually encode deontic modality.

This study aims to reveal and compare the embodied cognition of English and Turkish speakers through their use of body part terms in basic colour term idioms. More specifically, it addresses the distribution of the body part terms in Turkish and English basic colour term idioms and conceptual metonymies underlying these idioms, and it interprets the findings in terms of socio-cultural and socio-cognitive structures in the minds and linguistic practices of people of Turkish and English cultures. In order to achieve this aim, the idioms with Berlin and Kay’s basic colour terms and body part terms are selected from the specialized dictionaries on idioms. After the collection of data, the cognitive analysis is conducted within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The result demonstrates that although there are some conceptual metaphors and metonymies which tend to be universal as they are grounded in bodily experience, English and Turkish speakers’ conceptualizations through the basic colour terms and body parts vary tremendously because of different socio-cultural and socio-cognitive backgrounds of these speech communities.

The Tocharian A Maitreyasamitināṭaka, a long dramatic text about the future Buddha Maitreya that is translated into Old Uyghur prose as the Maitrisimit, is one of the most important texts of Tocharian and Old Uyghur Buddhism. It is of crucial importance for Tocharian studies because even smaller fragments can often be interpreted successfully with the help of the better preserved Old Uyghur parallels. In this paper, the beginning of the 11th act about the birth of Maitreya is studied, comparing the Tocharian A and Old Uyghur fragments which are in part parallel and in part complementary.

Emotion concepts across different cultures and languages have been studied extensively. New research on emotion concepts can efficiently capture the “experience-near” and “universal” aspects of cultures and languages for the construction of a language-independent semantic metalanguage, namely the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard, 1998). Wierzbicka (1999) claims that lexical discriminations in the area of emotions (as well as in other semantic fields) provide important clues to the speakers’ conceptualizations, and thus, a considerable amount of lexical data collection and of serious semantic analysis is needed before any universals in the area of emotion concepts can be proposed. Based on the classification of the cognitive scenarios for emotion terms in Wierzbicka (1999), the current study investigated one area of the emotion lexicon in English and Turkish, that is, a set of terms within the domain of “I don’t want things like this to happen”. It explored how these concepts relate to each other in terms of their cognitive scenarios intra-linguistically and whether their cognitive scenarios match within the domain of “I don’t want things like this to happen”. The study revealed the core meanings of target concepts show a high amount of correspondence, excluding cases of immediacy and intensity.

The richness and frequency of Italian and English proverbs containing terms as head - testa, capo, eye - occhio, forehead - fronte, nose – naso, mouth - bocca, hand - mano, arm - braccio leg/foot - piede, etc. all referring to different parts of the body, are well-known. The aim of the present paper is to make a detailed contrastive analysis of the proverbs containing these terms as a dominant term in the two languages, based on their semantic classification. Moreover, the second part of the paper makes some useful suggestions for teaching and learning such proverbs.

In this article a new etymology is presented for an important cultural “Wanderwort”, “garlic”. The author uses the earlier elaborated etymologies of Turkic, Mongolie and Indo-European languages by explaining the well-known Turkic sarmysak ‘garlic’ as an Indo-European loan word. This explanation is based on Iranian data which were not used by the linguists before.

The paper examines the mysterious term al-wark, which – according to Maḥmūd of Kāşğarī (11th century AD) – denotes a small animal similar to a badger (Turk. borsmuk) in the Xakani language. This animal was treated as a symbol of fatness. It is suggested that the term in question was borrowed from a Tocharian source. The Indo-European term *wṛḱos (m.) ‘badger’ (originally ‘fat animal’, cf. Hittite warkant- adj. ‘fat’) is reconstructed on the basis of Indic, Greek and Anatolian lexical data.

This paper presents a new decipherment of the Langjun Inscription of 1134 A.D., including a significantly revised phonological reconstruction of the text, new readings of several graphemes, paleographical notes on certain Kitan and Chinese graphemes encountered in the text, and a glossary of words contained in the text including identifiable etyma. In terms of methodology, the Kitan and corresponding Chinese texts of this bilingual inscription are juxtaposed to facilitate decipherment and reconstruction. Although several important philological studies of this text exist, this article presents the first linguistic reconstruction of the inscription.

The article draws attention to two lesser known lines written in Glagolitic which are part of the Epilogue to Pamvo Berynda’s Triod Cvetnaja, printed in Kiev in 1631. Thanks to their typographic realisation, these two lines seem to have been mainly considered „an ornament“ or a „cryptographic“ element of the text in older literature. The article presents the Glagolitic text in standard Unicode encoding, so it becomes electronically searchable as such, along with a transliteration and a translation. It turns out that the Glagolitic text is nearly identical to the self-descriptions famout printer Pamvo Berynda had used before (although in Cyrillic). Another question put forth in the paper is the provenience of the actual printing types used in Kiev in 1631. A comparision shows that the letters look similar – but not identical – to printing type used around the same time Italy (Rome, Venice) or by Primož Trubar in the century before. The typographic quality of the Kievan types is, however, inferior.

The two Turkic etymologies of Hung. ocsúdik (1508) ‘to awake, to come to, to regain consciousness’ proposed, on the one hand, in the late 19th century by Vámbéry (1870) and, on the other, by K. Palló in 1976 and 1982, have been rightly rejected by the authors of TLH. At the same time, the explanation for the origin of this word found in the etymological dictionaries of Hungarian (TESz, EWUng, Zaicz 2006), namely, that it is a derivative of an unknown unproductive stem, is not entirely convincing for morphological reasons. The present paper offers a new etymology for this word, explaining it as a loanword from East Slavonic очюдитися ‘to regain consciousness, to awake’ attested in 16th- and 17th-century Russian. The starting point for the discussion is M. Stachowski’s (2014) article, in which he compared Hung. ocsúdik with Polish dialectal ocudzić ‘to revive’.

The paper studies the collocations formed by ‘absolutely’ used as an adverbial intensifier for modifying adjectives in a corpus of Letters to the Editor, published in British and Bulgarian newspapers, and the BNC. The results of the study show the similarities between the collocations of ‘absolutely’ in English and Bulgarian as well as the resemblances in the choice of a syntactic position of the modified adjectives in both languages.

The paper submits the findings of the research which explored the acoustic properties of highly competent Serbian L2 speakers’ vowels and the vowels produced by American native speakers in two reading tasks. The study involved four participants: two female native speakers of English and two highly proficient female Serbian speakers of English. The participants were instructed to read a dialogue and a story, after which the duration and the quality of the vowels produced were measured. Based on the analysis of the collected data, the results showed that there were differences in the production of vowels between the two groups of speakers, but it was concluded that, despite these differences, the Serbian participants did not have any major issues with the production of vowels that would significantly, or at all, afflict their intelligibility. Neither the vowel quality nor the vowel duration was critical for the Serbian participants compared to that of the American speakers. What the research instead inferred was that the American participants displayed a strong tendency to reduce their vowels, while the Serbian participants did not reveal such a marked tendency to do the same.

Acquisition of derivation is not a well-studied area in first language research and a comparative approach to the acquisition of derivation in different languages doesn’t exist. There is no information on how a child acquires derivation in a language with a rich and regular system of derivational patterns, or in a language where derivation is productive, but the system of derivational patterns is opaque. According to general ideas of complexity in a language, the child should start to use simplex stems first and, only after that, complex ones, that is, complexity should increase in the course of acquisition. Our paper is intended to address these issues, based on longitudinal child data from typologically different languages, Estonian and Russian. The results revealed significant differences in the acquisition of noun derivation in the two languages under observation. The system of noun derivation is acquired at a faster pace in Russian, while Estonian children have far fewer noun derivatives in their speech and they use different derivation suffixes with less regularity. Even so, the so-called building block model may be applied for both languages only partially.

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of six English evidential adverbs ending in -ly with their Spanish nearest translation equivalents, in spoken and newspaper discourse. The adverbs may be associated with varying degrees of reliability: high (clearly/claramente, evidently/evidentemente, obviously/obviamente), medium (apparently/al parecer) and low (seemingly/aparentemente, supposedly/supuestamente). The analysis is based on tokens of authentic language extracted from two contemporary corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). The qualitative analysis focuses on the evidential functions of the adverbs and on their pragmatic interactional uses; the quantitative analysis centres on the relative frequency of type of evidential functions and the clausal position of the adverbs. The results uncover a number of differences between the English adverbs and their Spanish correlates and also between the two discourse types. Practically all the adverbs are strongly specialized in expressing either indirect-inferential or indirect-reportative evidentiality. English obviously and Spanish evidentemente show a high frequency of cases of loss of evidential meaning due to pragmaticalization, specifically in spoken discourse. Regarding position, the English adverbs are more frequent in medial clausal position, while some Spanish adverbs are often found in the more prominent parenthetical position.

The long-range series “Aegyptio-Afroasiatica”is devoted to the publication of new Afro-Asiatic etymologies of Egyptian lexical roots which have been identified in the course of my research on the “Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian”(EDE, Leiden, Brill, published since 1999). The underlying consonant correspondences the proposed etymologies are based on have been elaborated and demonstrated in EDE I. The numeration of the etymological entries in the present contribution continues that of the previous parts.

During my current work on the Egyptian Etymological Word Catalogue (EEWC, ongoing since summer 1994), it has become possible to identify a great number of new lexical correspondences between Egyptian and its vast Afro-Asiatic (Semito-Hamitic) kindred. The series of papers “AegyptioAfroasiatica” has been started in 1995 for reporting these results. The numbering of etymological entries is continuous beginning from my very first report.

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